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E3 2016 Media Coverage Analysis – aka “Who won the E3 media battle?”

E3 is now over, the weekend has passed, the attendees have flown back to their homes, and it is time for me to go over the media coverage of the events, as is now traditional. If you are new to them, I invite you to first check on the methodology that we use, and then to have a read of last year’s analysis.

Platforms

We now have 3 years’ worth of data to compare, and this constitutes a relatively easy-to-read snapshot of the event, and one that sets the tone for how well the event did, from a media coverage perspective:

This is the 2nd year where Nintendo as a brand is declining in the media coverage during E3. The lack of any hardware announcement where both Sony and Microsoft made one, and the format of their announcement that focuses on the online audience rather than to the in-person press conferences of its competitors means that the firm is losing out on mindshare with the media during the E3 week.

On the Sony front, 2015 saw a slight dip, but this year has seen the most mentions of any console brand across an E3 week since we began our tracking. This is on the back of the teasing of the PS4 Neo, and a release date and price for Playstation VR. It is also the press conference that had the highest proportion of new games announced:

Here is a quick and dirty analysis of each press event type of announcements (for games). pic.twitter.com/YXBGoctQe8

— Thomas Bidaux ⚔ (@icotom) June 14, 2016

For Microsoft, this also proved to be an excellent E3, as for the 2nd year media mentions of their console brand has increased, taking it to the level Playstation had in 2014. The double announcements of the Xbox One S and the Project Scorpio with its promise of VR support were the strongest take-aways from their press conference.

Again this year, the PS4 and the Xbox One are the two leading platforms in terms of media coverage. Interestingly, the Wii platforms and the 3DS have both declined significantly, the former more drastically so than the latter. A lot of this can be also be attributed by the significantly smaller support from 3rd party for the Nintendo devices, that rely on its own games for the majority of coverage.

Looking at the reach (details on the method at the end of the blog post), the gap between the Playstation 4 and the Xbox One is a lot narrower. The generally higher profile of media covering the Xbox new devices is probably helping.

Another interesting difference is how good the Oculus Rift’s reach is compared to the number of articles. There seems to be a strong interest in VR devices from bigger media outlets.

Looking specifically at the 3 leading VR tethered HMDs, the HTC Vive still got a significant amount of media coverage, through announcements made to support it (notably Fallout 4). Last week also saw a lot of controversy pitting the Oculus publishing strategy against the HTC Vive’s, probably feeding media coverage of both devices.

Of course, the Playstation VR was at the heart of VR hardware news with a launch date and price announced.

Games

Following the format set last year, I have looked into the games that got the most media coverage, before getting into the ones specifically presented during the publishers’ press conferences, and then looking at interesting smaller case studies.

Here are a few thoughts coming to me immediately after looking at this list of games:

There was no “Fallout 4-style” announcement dominating the media like last year.
EA’s strategy to “not attend” E3 has paid off for them. They have the 2 games dominating the media that week. It seems like the notion from last year that going first gives you an edge might be true here as well.
Despite Nintendo’s poor media presence, it has one of the most talked about games of the show with The Legend of Zelda: Breath of the Wild. By comparison, there were no Nintendo games in the top 15 ranking last year.
Overwatch is still going incredibly strong (if you follow me on Twitter, it was the game with the most media presence in May), getting into these rankings without having any E3-related news.

Looking at the reach of the articles on video games, it is impressive to see that the new Zelda has indeed caught the attention of the most influential media. In the same vein, whilst the new Hideo Kojima game Death Stranding didn’t have as many articles as the new PREY, the media covering it are overall bigger ones.

There were only 3 publisher-powered press conferences this year, with Square Enix skipping it this time around. While Ubisoft had better coverage for its top titles than last year, it is still not doing as well as EA or Bethesda, both having been set prior to the console makers events.

EA sees its two first-person shooters dominating the line up. Whilst Battlefield is a known quantity, and it doing very well is not surprising, Titanfall 2 is a surprising 2nd as the most talked about game of E3. Another surprise is the how a sports title like FIFA, a genre that doesn’t usually get a lot of media to talk about them in comparison, has had more coverage than any of the Ubisoft titles for instance. The announcement of the story mode probably played a very strong part in this. And lastly, Mass Effect: Andromeda, despite having very little shown about it last week AND being an RPG, also not the biggest genre for video games, has performed remarkably well in the media.

Out of the 4 most discussed Bethesda titles, only 1 hasn’t been released yet, and it had already been announced last year, showing an interesting trend for Bethesda’s games to capture the attention of the media beyond their launch – more so than the upcoming titles like PREY or Quake Champions.

As for Ubisoft, Watch Dogs 2 is continuing to get the interest of the media following its recent reveal. The time allocated to For Honor during the Ubisoft presentation was significant, probably helping the game garner media coverage last week. The conference closer though, Steep, despite being set as the piece de resistance, wasn’t as popular as other games from the Ubisoft line up.

For the first time (mostly because we have improved the way our tool works, and can now more properly track names that were tricky in the past for us, notably EA), I have looked into the publishers’ names mentioned in the media and the result is quite as expected:

All 3 companies with a press event are doing way better than all the other ones. Interestingly, they actually do more or less the same, the excellent coverage that Bethesda got for a few games being counterbalanced by the larger number of games that are present in the Ubisoft line-up, for instance.

Case studies

Looking at specific data points, I have selected a few interesting case studies to quickly present here.

I mentioned it earlier, but FIFA 17 did much much better than last year’s iteration. We are talking almost twice the coverage from last year. The new key feature announced (the story mode) as well as the timing of the EA press conference are my two strongest theories as to why this is.

Like last year, I made an arbitrary selection of games to share data on. This is the best way to show the different scales for games using E3 for communication. Here are some thoughts:

We Happy Few. It was shown, on stage, during the Xbox press event. The game has never had so much coverage since it was announced (unsurprisingly), and despite the absence of publisher support, it is seeing more coverage than other games with such support.
Vampyr. The new title developed by Life is Strange‘s studio DontNod, published by Focus Interactive, was featured during the PC Gaming Show and is probably the game featured there that had the most coverage.
Fe. The successor to Unravel as the indie-title-being-published-by-EA. It didn’t capture as much media attention as Unravel though (700+ articles at E3 last year).
Dawn of War III. Another game featured during the PC Gaming Show, published by Sega. It makes me think that Sega doesn’t put a lot of energy into E3.
Cuphead. This was the 3rd year for the title to be showed at E3. Still getting quite a decent coverage, but not something in the same scale as last year’s.
Oxygen Not Included. The new upcoming game from Klei entertainment (Don’t Starve, Shank), the game was one of the few games actually revealed during the PC Gaming Show. The coverage it got makes me wonder if the game might have done better in terms of coverage at a smaller event like PAX.

Overall, games that have strong infrastructures behind them (publishers mostly) have much, much better coverage at E3, as one might expect.

With VR still being a strong topic at this year’s E3, I wanted to give a check on the VR games that were the most talked about during the week.

The two most mentioned games are both backed by very strong franchises, respectively Batman and Star Trek, maybe showing the path for VR to claw its way to the mass market audiences.

Closing words

All things considered, 2016 was a strong E3, although with much of the action happening on the periphery of the event itself, the “E3 show” as we know it is certainly changing. EA, running its event in parallel, actually came out stronger than it had in the past at the event. It might be a new trend starting, with the question of the role the show itself would play if more companies decide to piggy back on the draw it has with media during the week, without actually contributing to it. Would it work out at all without the support of the majority of large publishers?

A few technical notes

Why Nintendo and not the Wii?

In the graphs on consoles over the past 3 years, I am comparing the Playstation and Xbox brands to Nintendo. The fact is that the other consoles have consistent brands where Nintendo machines are using multiple brands. Moreover, Sony and Microsoft are two companies with activities spread across multiple industries and cannot fairly be compared to Nintendo when we look at articles on games. Nintendo is also a strong publisher, and its brand more established than the one of its consoles, compared to Sony and Microsoft. Comparing platforms to brands is the best way to have comparable results to look at the Nintendo brand rather than the Wii for instance (or even a combination of the Nintendo consoles).

What is the reach value?

* Like last year, I am referring a few times to the notion of reach. Here is a reminder about it:

The following graph requires some pre-explanation. In order to measure the magnitude of an article, with have created a formula based on the websites’ Alexa ranking to give their articles different “weight”. The more popular the website, the more weight we give to their article. This value is called Reach in our tools and range from 0.1 to 10. For example, currently, Eurogamer.net has a reach of 10, Gamasutra.com has a reach of 8, Road to VR has a reach of 6. So what you see below, is a chart of the total reach of all the articles showed above. We refresh the reach values constantly.

June 21, 2016/2 Comments/by Thomas BIDAUX

PR Intelligence

The clash of Titans – Call of Duty Infinite Warfare and Battlefield 1 reveals media coverage

It is human nature to want to take sides when you perceive there to be a conflict, and in the EA versus Activision video game publishing war, the recurring battle pitting their FPS franchises against one another is one of the favourite conflicts of the gaming landscape.

Last week saw this year’s protagonists being revealed within days of each other, and I thought I would share the numbers we have gathered on the two games, alongside with the data related to the video reveals.

Context

To understand the different results, it is very important to look at the context of each announcement.

Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare

The name was first leaked through a listing on the PlayStation store end of April, alongside further leaks about a remastered version of Call of Duty Modern Warfare. The proper reveal really happened on the 2nd of May (Monday last week).

Battlefield 1

Battlefield had made a pre-announcement the 29th of April, announcing the date of the reveal for the 5th of May (Friday last week) at 9pm BST. Included in the coverage was a number of speculations around the setting of the game due to leaks of materials related to the event on the Friday.

Basically, there were hints of both game reveals (the exact time and date for BF1) ahead of their video reveals.

Media presence

Let’s look at the number of articles first. As a reminder, I am using our media monitoring tool for this.

As Battlefield 1 announced late on a Friday, it probably suffered a lot from a coverage perspective. I would usually compare an announcement over the first 2 days, but clearly, that was not representing fairly the actual coverage for that game. So this time, I looked at the first 5 days, from the moment the reveal trailer was available for each game.

Despite having gone through a weekend, Battlefield 1 is still quite close to the Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare numbers. But even for media, this doesn’t tell the whole story.

Looking purely at the unique number of websites covering each game, Battlefield 1 is slightly ahead. Considering the power of each franchise, Call of Duty being the regular better seller between the two, this is quite an achievement here. Both games have been incredibly well covered though, it is fair to say.

As my interest often lies with European specific issues, I dug a bit further to find out where the discrepancy came from.

We have a negligible difference in numbers for English, French, Italian and Spanish. Where the difference lies is with German websites, and that very wide “Others” category which is mostly websites from Eastern Europe and Russia.

Video statistics

Over the weekend, there was a very interesting article link to the Forbes article titled “‘Battlefield 1’ Is The Most Liked Trailer In YouTube History, ‘Infinite Warfare’ The Most Disliked“. I encourage you to read it, I will mostly share similar data points here (post-weekend numbers though) to put them in light of the media coverage numbers above.

Both videos have received an insane amount of views, but despite a head start of almost 5 days, Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare is falling short of the Battlefield 1 numbers.

The comparison for the “likes” and “dislikes” on Youtube highlight a very clear division between the two. There is a very clear statement of which video is more popular beyond the views, with Call of Duty: Infinite Warfare having almost as many dislikes as Battlefield 1 has likes (in terms of the percentage of overall sentiment).

Battlefield 1’s popularity lead also echoes through the social media data from VidIQ on the two videos:

Conclusion

This is only the first part of this year’s confrontation, but it is quite an interesting one as the timing really puts them in a head-to-head position from which comparing their relative performance is quite easy. But we shouldn’t lose perspective on the fact that both games actually got a massive amount of visibility.

While we are not quite at the level that Fallout 4 had for its pre-E3 reveal (almost 3,500 articles over the same 5 days period), this is still quite close. Since we have been tracking those two franchises (from early 2014), these two announcements were both the biggest (probably for very different reasons), which is quite promising for things to come.

May 12, 2016/0 Comments/by Thomas BIDAUX

Best Practice, PR Intelligence

ICO GDC 2016 talk for free: The 5 Pillars & Pitfalls of Indie Games PR

On this blog we mostly talk about topics from the video games consulting part of ICO Partners, but we also have an excellent Public Relations team working on a wide range of clients and titles (from big players like SMITE, Fractured Space, Endless Legend to indie titles such as Evoland, The Lion’s Song and Fragments of Him).

This April I did a talk at GDC about indie games PR titled “Everyone Can do PR – The 5 Pillars & Pitfalls of Indie Games PR”. You can watch the talk for free on the GDC Vault by clicking on the image below. You can also check out the slides and download them here.

Talk description: “In today’s crowded games market that sees hundreds of game releases each month, getting overlooked is one of the biggest threats for indie games. This session covers the 5 PR pillars indie studios doing their own PR should prioritize in order to get heard by press, youtubers and streamers. This 5 key areas are backed up with practical examples and by showing data such as effects of PR stunts on media coverage and sales. The talk also covers 5 typical pitfalls in indie games PR and 5 future trends that will shape how to do PR as a small game studio in the future.”

April 22, 2016/0 Comments/by Thomas Reisenegger

PR Intelligence

Is an April fools’ joke a good PR tool for your game?

The unamusing data analysis of four recent examples

[Update: The Rocket League team have been in touch with and clarified this year’s April Fool’s prank was – unlike the assumption made by us and several other news outlets – not actually made by them, but rather a community site. We added an additional paragraph in the Rocket League section on this post to reflect this.]

Traditionally, on every April 1^st countless game makers pull off April fools’ jokes, with at least as many gamers and more importantly media laughing or complaining about them. This raises the question of whether cooking up an April fool’s joke could be more than just an enjoyable team building exercise, and actually be a strong PR tool for your game? The short answer: yes! Just kidding: like almost everything in PR it depends on circumstance.

To try answer the above question more in-depth, we analysed some general data from this year’s jokes. We also examined four very different examples in greater detail. The data below should hopefully help you decide whether participating in next years April’s fool’s fun is worth your PR resources.

2016’s April pranks PR performance comparison

In the graph below you can see the general ranking of this year’s April fools’ jokes according to how many articles they generated in media. For more info on the tracking method please read this entry. Please also note that this selection excludes several jokes – such as Hearthstones fake MMO – due to it being a too much of a generic name for our tool to track consistently. Furthermore, other stunts that didn’t get enough coverage to be tracked, were also excluded.

If you are interested in what the actual joke for the games in the graph were, I have listed links to them at the very end at the article but now back to the coverage graph. Unsurprisingly, big brands like The Witcher 3 and Dark Souls III led the coverage charts. However, the fact that a small title like Clustertruck gained more traction than big brands like Final Fantasy 14 and most notably Rocket League, shows that a strong name doesn’t necessarily guarantee coverage when the idea or execution of the PR stunt isn’t quite right.

In the four example case studies analysed, we take a look at what helped or hindered these stunts. But first let’s have a quick look at how the different games’ related videos performed on YouTube.

As mention before we couldn’t track Hearthstone’s MMO joke in terms of coverage but it still included in the Youtube overview graph which it is leading – most likely due to Blizzard’s strong community. While Dark Souls III was a very hot topic in the number of articles it was featured in, it was far less popular on YouTube compared to the Witcher 3. One explanation for this could be that news outlets were eager to pick up on the Dark Souls III news, as the game was due to be released a week after. Therefore, references to Dark Souls III would most certainly generate traffic on articles. However, in reality the audience wasn’t too impressed by the video itself, leading to the smaller numbers of views.

The big difference in coverage and YouTuber numbers could also be related to a variety of other factors, such as the Witcher 3 simply pushing video content more or having a stronger YouTube community.

Lets look at our four, hand-picked examples in a bit more detail.

Case Study 1
The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt with “Roach”

The Witcher 3’s joke high ranking does not come as a surprise as it has a lot going for it: a massive brand; a good quality video; and, of course, a horse. What was missing, however, was any sort of content or interaction with the actual game.

So by general metrics the Roach video was a huge success. Comparing the Witcher to its own high standards, it becomes clear that the April fool’s joke wasn’t strongly picked up by press compared to other Witcher news beats from the last year as illustrated in the graph below. Sure, it caused a decent bump in coverage, but compared to other Witcher news beats, it wasn’t as impressive.

Through looking at the Witcher’s YouTube channel however, it seems that CD Project Red had more success in reaching its YouTube audience with the April Fools’ joke. The video hit a little over a million views, which is pretty much exactly the average view count across all videos on the channel. The video also seemed to have resonated with the audience as 99% of the over 30,00 YouTube ratings were positive. It also got more views than for example a video of the unboxing of the special edition or a making of video featuring Charles Dance (Dad Lannister from Game of Thrones).

Case Study 2
Clustertruck with “SUPER TRUCK”

If you follow my Twitter you will know I’m a big fan of tinybuild’s unconventional and often clever PR stunts. For April fool’s they managed to pull of an impressive joke for their game Clustertruck called SUPER TRUCK.

Not only does the April fool’s joke come with a high quality video, it also plays on Super Hot and perfectly capitalizes on the high profile of the indie hit. In addition, the joke offered a playable version of SUPER TRUCK that repackages and promotes the gameplay of the upcoming actual game Clustertruck

The video alone managed to get 88.420 views on tinybuilds official YouTube channel. None of the other Clustertruck videos from developer Landfill Game’s reached such a high viewing number.

Another very positive side effect of a playable April Fools’ joke is buzz from YouTubers. Just from a quick search of the first page of YouTube search results for “SUPER TRUCK” we spotted over 2 million additional views from additional Let’s Plays. A nice benefit that others – for example The Witcher’s Roach or the Hearthstone MMO – missed out on.

Media coverage also turned out to be great for a relatively low profile game like Clustertruck, resulting in the biggest PR beat for the game until now. That being said, SUPER TRUCK alone generated nearly three times the amount of articles than articles about the April Fools’ joke that also mention the actual game Clustertruck, which might be both positive and negative. On the one hand, the lack of a clear and visible link between the two games may have resulted in the April Fool’s stunt looking less like a promotion, thus leading to more players’ interest. However, this doesn’t help Clustertruck as much as it could have in terms of brand awareness.

Either way, the joke is the biggest PR topic for Clustertruck so far and shows that with the right idea, a good asset, and something playable, an April fools has the potential to be a great PR booster for both press and YouTubers alike.

Case Study 3
Guild Wars 2 with “Super Adventure Box”

Guild Wars 2 has a tradition for April fool’s jokes of adding retro looking levels to the game. This years Super Adventure box missed a video (which was a bit of a shame in my opinion) but the actual new content in the game generated a very good amount of articles for the online game.

Looking at Guild Wars 2 coverage from the last year it is clear that the game has been out for a while and it is getting a bit quieter around the title. However, the in-game event managed to generate a nice media bump for the title that would have had most likely far less media impact if it wouldn’t have been placed on 1 April.

Case Study 4
Rocket League with “Ragequit Bot”

Update: The Rocket League team have been in touch with and clarified this year’s April Fool’s prank was – unlike the assumption made by us and several other news outlets – not actually made by them, but rather a community site. Apologies for the misunderstanding to the Rocket League team and congratulations to the Rocket League Garage team. To my knowledge this is one of the few times a fan made April Fool’s joke has made it into several prank round-ups from gaming websites. April Fool is on us I guess!

As mentioned above, getting media attention for an April Fools joke is no doubt easier with a bigger brand. However, our final case study, Rocket League, demonstrated clearly that even a huge name does not guarantee media attention. Rocket League’s video seemed a bit rushed, not very well thought-out, and most importantly not very funny.

That is also reflected in the media coverage for the trailer, which hovered somewhere in the single to low double digit numbers, whereas more successful news beats for the game generated several hundred articles. As Rocket League was also featured on several other topics that day, the low performance of the Ragequit bot video is not very apparent in the coverage graph above. To make it more visible, we decided to display it in a separate line in the graph.

On the YouTube front, the video didn’t generate great viewing numbers for the Rocket League community. It should be pointed out however that the video was not featured on the main YouTube channel of Rocket League, but instead on a community channel.

On average a video on the Rocket League main channel gets 173.613 views, and the community channel 115.404 views; the Ragequit Bot only managed to get 64.254 views, meaning that it under-performed in direct comparison.

The five golden rules of April fool’s jokes

To conclude, we wrote up five rules to keep in mind if you try to run an April fool’s joke next year.

Stick to joke that are obviously jokes – even an idiot can see it is not serious…
… but even if taken seriously, then make sure the announcement can’t be seen as a negative.
If you don’t have good ideas, don’t do a prank announcement. Better nothing than something lame.
Announce your prank before 12:00 pm. Late jokes seem out of place and miss round up featuring.
If you manage to have something that is playable, do it. It works for Let’s Plays videos, it can get you tons of extra views; but it will get better effect overall.

2016 April pranks featured in this article

Dark Souls III: The Movie
Witcher 3: Roach
Guild Wars 2: Super Adventure Box
Clustertruck: SUPER TRUCK
Final Fantasy 14: ChocoGo
Arma III: Eau De Combat
Warhamme Vermintide: Death Wish
Rocket League: Ragequit bot
Hearthstone: MMO

April 14, 2016/0 Comments/by Thomas Reisenegger

PR Intelligence

GDC 2016 in media coverage

VR dominates the headlines, PlayStation beats Xbox and less but better coverage for the event

Like last year, I have put together a quick summary of the media coverage the Game Developer Conference received. If you have a look at last year’s blog post, you will see the methodology for measuring events’ media coverage has evolved. For events, I am looking at the “Key 20 days”, standing for the 9 days prior to the events and the 11 days from the beginning of the event. For topics, like last year, we look at the coverage for the whole week, from Sunday to Sunday that specifically mentioned the event.

GDC 2016: Fewer articles but higher profile coverage

For anyone attending, this year was a really impressive GDC. The halls were busy right from the beginning of the week and this is the first time since I have been attending the event (about 15 years out of 30 years of its existence) that I saw sessions showing as being full on the Monday.

Surprisingly, the official press release after the event that shows attendance numbers, announced the event has only grown from “more than 26,000 visitors” to “more than 27,000 visitors“.

Where does GDC 2016 stand from a media coverage perspective though?

There has been a slight decline in the number of articles mentioning GDC this year. It still saw more media coverage than 2 years ago though, and this is a significant amount of media attention for a professional event.

The fact is, even more than other comparable events, GDC media coverage is very dependent on the profile of the announcements made during the week and there are no staple press conferences like the ones at E3 or gamescom. Last year’s HTC Vive reveal, or the Unreal and Unity shifts of business models announcements might be at play here? The single biggest news in this 2016 edition was the Playstation VR’s price point though, but more on this later.

* Just a reminder that E3 is missing due to technical limitations with our tools.

The GDC stays in the same range of media coverage as the Playstation Experience or the Paris Games Week (the one with the Sony Press Conference).

However, there is one metric on which it stays ahead.

I have mentioned in the past, we give different media outlets a score based on their Alexa ranking. The better the ranking, the higher the score, up to a maximum of 10. This score doesn’t feature very often in the blog post as it is not always relevant and I also try to keep things simple (even if sometimes I fail despite various experiments over on Twitter).

The following graph shows the average score for the articles covering different game events. It is quite telling.

With the exception of the Playstation Experience 2015, the GDC is standing head and shoulders above the other events in terms of the profile of the media covering it. More articles are written that mention GDC from large websites than any other event, and this might be stemming from the professional dimension of the event.

Games engines media coverage comparison

More than any other event, GDC sees more announcements related to game engines and professional software and it is always interesting to see which one is coming on top each edition.

This year was light on announcement around game engines, especially compared to last year. Crytek’s “Pay what you want” communication being the one standing out once the dust settled, but it still didn’t rock the world the way Unreal’s communication last year did.

Virtual Reality wins GDC

While it seems the decline in media coverage from last year could be explained purely by the fewer articles on game engine, it is time to address the biggest topic of this year’s GDC.

Bingo!
That's how GDC felt from the discussions around. 🙂 pic.twitter.com/gicp0p2UYR

— Thomas Bidaux ⚔ (@icotom) March 19, 2016

And while I wrote this right after the event, it is interesting to see that the general feeling that Virtual Reality took over this year edition is not just an impression:

No question about it, between the eminent release of the Rift, and the Playstation VR announcements, there has been a lot of media coverage for Virtual Reality the week of GDC.

Virtual Reality was such a big topic that of the articles that mention GDC, a significant portion of them were about VR:

In those five days, 28% of articles mentioning GDC are about VR. On the 16th of March, the day with the most articles related to the GDC, 38% of those articles mention VR. Even on the 17th of March, where VR is only in 17% of GDC articles, it was the dominant topic.

Platforms comparison – A strong year for Sony and PlayStation

Looking at the evolution from one year to another in regards to the platforms and their coverage during the GDC week.

Things have stayed more or less at the same level for Xbox. There was quite a bit of news from Microsoft though, between the announcement they would open their platform for crossplay and the doubling down on the ID@Xbox commitment.

Playstation obviously is surfing on the Playstation VR wave, and probably has a few more things related to this up its sleeve for E3.

Leading up to June, it will be interesting to see how much Sony builds up on the momentum that the VR hype has created.

April 5, 2016/0 Comments/by Thomas BIDAUX

PR Intelligence

Top games in the media in 2015 (and how well the platforms did too)

With 2015 behind us, and the new year already under way, it is time for the traditional year-in-review articles, and I don’t see any reason for us to avoid the trend. I went to Twitter to ask about what to tackle first, and the media overview won over a Kickstarter post (probably due to my recent article on GI.biz satisfying the need for the time being, but don’t worry, a Kickstarter related article will happen too).

As usual, if you are not familiar with the way the data is collected, I invite you to read the blog post on the topic.

Games

As a reminder, we mostly look at the top games for every single month. While this is not ideal, at least it provides some insights on what the top topics in the media are. I have selected a few games to look at in more detail to help give some sense of scale.

But to start things, here are the top 15 games that garnered the most media coverage in 2015:

First thing, please note the scale starts at 20,000 articles over the whole year. It is a bit deceiving, but it does make the chart easier to read.

At the top, at a comparable amount of coverage, we have 3 different games:

The Witcher 3. An action RPG, historically a PC franchise, from a smaller publisher (smaller doesn’t mean small though) and that got a fantastic amount of coverage which I believe is mostly because of how good it is and how much its audience wanted to read about it. CD Project also managed the communication on the title very well, including after launch and with a strong and clever DLC strategy.
Fallout 4. I have talked a lot about Fallout 4 in the past already. The game got a huge amount of coverage, but is not the first on the list only because it was announced until we were already 5 months into the year.
Grand Theft Auto V. A game launched released in 2013, but the franchise is strong in the family (should have kept that one for the next game in the list, but hey). If you look at the key events for this game in the year, it was mostly the PC release. For a strong console franchise this is not considered key, but it seems there is a never-ending interest for the GTA games in the media.

Next in the line is Star Wars Battlefront, which did significantly well in terms of coverage. However, considering this is the comeback of a beloved name, a Star Wars game released close to the 7th Episode of the movie saga, and the Battlefield/DICE FPS of the holidays, it came to be expected that it would do well with the media.

A few other things I feel like pointing out:

Minecraft is a regular performer in the monthly media performance overview, and it is a game that is incredibly steady (few spikes, but few lows) and expected to be in this ranking. League of Legends, though, is rarely in the monthly Top 15 games, but is incredibly steady in the amount of media coverage it gets. While I expected the game to have a wider reach due to the final Worlds being in Europe (with events across different countries for about a month), it makes it one of the most presented game in online media in 2015.
There are 4 games in that list that are exclusives: Bloodborne (released in spring with less high profile competition and more time to gather coverage through the year), Halo 5 (the strongest Microsoft game franchise… after Minecraft), Rise of the Tomb Raider (an iconic, hall-of-famey franchise) and… Splatoon. Incredibly good media coverage for the Nintendo squid-shooter game, and again I believe the quality of the game resulted in its excellent media presence.

Highlighted games through 2015

In order to give some sense of the media coverage for games, I arbitrarily picked 5 games with fairly different patterns on the way they are covered. Right away, with this first comparison, we can see the difference in the scale of the coverage between 3 of the top 15 games in media coverage, and 2 indie games that were very well covered by media.

Fallout 4 had a dream start at E3, getting record breaking coverage during the event. But the coverage it received on release, 16,000 articles in the month of November, is way, way more than the highest number of articles for a single game in a month. In 2014, the game with the most articles in a given month was Watch Dogs with close to 11,000 articles when it was released in May, with the close second GTA 5 with 9,600 articles in November, both of those performances being quite unique during the year. Here we have Fallout 4 with close to 50% more articles than the best of those performance in November. Truly a phenomenon.

I was talking about the steadiness of the Minecraft media coverage and I really wanted to show it off. There were never less than 2,000 articles per month and there was a nice flow of new releases, as well as the announcements of the support with new devices like the Oculus Rift and Microsoft’s Hololens for instance.

Rise of the Tomb Raider illustrates nicely the media cycle for a game as part of a big franchise. The game had been announced earlier in the previous year and before E3 had very few communications pushed by out by Square Enix and Crystal Dynamics. The February spike is coming from the one announcement in that period, about the fact the game would be released on the Xbox 360 as well.

Then E3 kicked in, the machine was in motion, steadily ramping up till the launch of the game in November.

I make no secret of my undying love for Goat Simulator and its incredibly efficient communication style. The DayZ parody DLC (even though I no longer know if this is still a parody with Goat Sim) in May was the height of the media coverage for the game, followed by the media coverage of the PS3/PS4 version of the game in August. It is interesting to see how the larger overall coverage observed for the different platforms is echoed here for Goat Simulator where, while released earlier on Xbox 360 and Xbox One (in April), it didn’t receive as many mentions in the media.

Looking at the most important months in terms of coverage for Don’t Starve:

June saw two very large announcements with the release of Don’t Starve Together and Don’t Starve coming to Xbox One.
In December, Don’t Starve Shipwrecked was released in Early Access on Steam and Don’t Starve Together was featured at the PlayStation Experience.
May had the Wii U version of the game released.
April, July, August and November have a remarkably close amount of coverage which was (mostly) coming in respective order from the release of Invisible Inc. (where many media mentioned Klei as “The makers of Don’t Starve”), the Don’t Starve Pocket edition release, the announcement of Don’t Starve Shipwrecked, and the announcement of the release date of Don’t Starve Shipwrecked on Early Access.

More games data

Monthly Top 15 Games in the media – 2015 edition

Platforms

I won’t be looking at 2015 year month by month, but will rather mention a few things that happened that are worth highlighting before sharing slides with the monthly data for anyone who wants to dig into those in more detail.

What’s is interesting to note is that looking at the whole year, there are big differences in the global coverage across the different platforms.

The PlayStation brand is having a very strong lead over Xbox, with 66% more articles taken over the whole period. The brand not only has more usage (PlayStation 3, PlayStation 4, PlayStation Vita, PlayStation VR) but also leads across products in a similar generation, with PlayStation 4 for instance having 35% more mentions in the media than the Xbox One.

Worth noting is that at the end of the year, mobile platforms are neck and neck in terms of coverage. The media samples we use are not heavily geared towards tech websites though, and it might be a totally different story if they were. We mostly have websites covering the game side of mobile (and sometimes also other news in that space), but regardless it is a very interesting outcome.

The Nintendo brands are very much behind the other consoles. This is not necessarily very surprising as there is a strong correlation between the number of title releases each console see every year, and Nintendo consoles don’t have as many title launches. Looking at the monthly data, Nintendo is also very much behind the curve on the media coverage.

PlayStation and Xbox

Unsurprisingly, the biggest month for the media coverage was E3. We have seen in the past that it is the event in the year that has the biggest media impact. Interestingly, March is next for both platforms. That month sees a lot of game releases, and I suspect a harder push on the media side because of the fiscal year ending. Events such as GDC and PAX East, while having some effect, are not covered enough to be the reason behind the March spike. September is the third biggest month for PlayStation; it sees the double effect of the first wave of the year-end releases and the Tokyo Game Show.

Of course, we can see the outcome of Microsoft being the only platform holder with a media conference at gamescom. It is the one month in the year where they clearly close the gap with Sony’s console, even if they don’t necessarily reach the same level.

Finally, the steady performance of the PlayStation over the last quarter is quite remarkable. A steady release of AAA games helps, but the positive effect of the PlayStation Experience on the media coverage is tremendous and the one reason that December, an otherwise slow month for the other platforms, is one of the strongest for Son – right in time for Christmas.

I think the competitors should take a page from Sony’s playbook on this.

Oculus

While I plan to delve further into VR in the media later this year, it is interesting to have a look at Oculus specifically. We are still far from the media coverage the large game platforms have, but this is still quite significant.

A lot of the Oculus media coverage is lead by announcements and events. June 2015 had the Oculus media event the week before E3, as well as coverage from the VR company’s presence at E3. May 2015 saw the announcement of the release of the commercial version for 2016, and while expected, this had been a confirmation as there were still discussions of the device being a Christmas 2015 release. September 2015 was when the Oculus Connect 2 event happened, and even while this is a developer event and the device not being available yet, it is a strong platform for announcements such as Minecraft coming to the Oculus Rift. Interestingly, December 2015 saw a more incremental build-up from multiple beats during the month, even if the Games Awards announcement (Guitar Hero VR leading the charge) had a strong effect there too.

Even though I was expecting to see a growth from last year (there were almost 30,000 articles in 2014, with at least 1,500 articles just on the Facebook acquisition of the company though), all in all, this is a decent point to build up from and we shall see how much VR will evolve in 2016 as the first time when you can actually buy the first commercial headset. Personally, I can’t wait to get our CV version that we will receive as Kickstarter backers.

More platforms data…

Monthly Games Platforms in the media – 2015 edition from ICO Partners

January 26, 2016/17 Comments/by Thomas BIDAUX